Otto Ohlendorf

Otto Ohlendorf (4 February 1907-7 June 1951) was an SS-Gruppenfuehrer who led the Sicherheitsdienst Inland, responsible for intelligence and security within Nazi Germany during World War II. Ohlendorf also led Einsatzgruppe D in a campaign of mass murder in Moldova, south Ukraine, Crimea, and the northern Caucasus during the invasion of the Soviet Union, and he was hanged for his crimes in 1951.

Biography
Otto Ohlendorf was born in Hoheneggelsen, Prussia, German Empire (now in Lower Saxony, Germany) on 4 February 1907, the son of farm owners. He joined the Nazi Party in 1925 and the SS in 1926, and he studied economics and law at the University of Leipzig and the University of Goettingen. He worked as a research director for the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and he also headed the trade section of the Reich Business Board. In 1936, Ohlendorf became the economic consultant of the Sicherheitsdienst, and he rose to the rank of SS-Standartenfuehrer and head of the domestic branch of the Reich Main Security Office in 1939.

In June 1941, Ohlendorf's SD boss Reinhard Heydrich appointed him head of the Einsatzgruppe D death squad in time for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. On 13 December 1941, his group was responsible for the massacre of 14,300 people (mostly Jews) at Simferopol in the Crimea, and over 90,000 people were murdered on his orders. After 1943, he became deputy director general in the Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs after leaving the Main Security Office, and he planned to introduce the new Deutsche Mark currency to the country; Heinrich Himmler supported Ohlendorf's plans over those of the "totally Bolshevik" state interventionist plans of Albert Speer's regime. Ohlendorf was arrested by the British Army near Lueneburg in May 1945, and he was the chief defendand at the Einsatzgruppen Trials of 1947-1948. Ohlendorf expressed no remorse for his actions, and he told the Jewish-American prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz that the Jews of America would suffer for what the prosecutor had done, and that he had only been concerned about the moral strain of his death squad members and not the fates of the victims. He was hanged at the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria on 8 June 1951.